Cheap writers can be expensive

Given the choice between an inexpensive writer with a limited skill set and a professional technical communicator, which should you choose?

First, a disclaimer. All of these numbers are estimates and based on anecdotal experience rather than solid research. If you want something academically defensible, you are in the wrong place.

I’ve been considering whether cheap writers are actually cheap. So I did some basic calculations:

Let’s compare a cheap writer at $40,000 per year to an expensive technical communicator at $80,000 per year.

Hmmm. Doesn’t look too good for the expensive technical communicator.

Now, let’s describe our two contenders:

• Cheap writer: Hired into a technical writing job with little or no previous experience in tech comm. Perhaps a background in marketing writing or in technical support. Not much expertise with tech comm tools or templates. Definitely lacking an understanding of writing for localization. Little interest in learning the profession.
  Primary reason for hire: Cost.
  Motto: “Style guides are annoying constraints on my creativity.”
• Expensive technical communicator: Previous technical writing experience (5-10 years). Knows and understands tech comm tools. Follows templates and style guides religiously. Always looking for opportunities to make content production process more efficient. Writes short, clear, jargon-free sentences as a matter of course. Looks for opportunities to improve knowledge of products (sit in with technical support, attend customer training classes).
  Primary reason for hire: Combination of writing ability, domain knowledge, and tools.
  Motto: “Reuse is my friend.”

(Yes, I exaggerate. Remember, this is a blog. If you are looking for reasoned academic discourse, please move on immediately.)

Now for the part where I invent productivity numbers that you can challenge.

Here are my assumptions:

Some explanations:

• I assume that each writer has 1,000 hours of actual writing time per year. One writer takes about four hours to write a topic; the other takes about two hours. This differential is based on more efficient use of tools (less flailing around looking for the right way to do something in the authoring tool), better understanding of the products (less research required), and better productivity with the actual writing.
• The editing load is the amount of time required to edit or review a topic. The more experienced technical communicator produces content that requires less editing and less time asking the editor (or a mentor) questions.
• Localization efficiency is mostly a measure of reuse. The expensive writer produces content in which 25% of information can be reused and therefore translated automatically. (There are other considerations, such as the correct application of templates. That cost is included in the editing load.)

Based on these numbers, we discover the following:

Not looking so cheap any more, that cheap writer…

(The cost formula is to take the loaded hourly rate and multiply by the total time per topic. For the cheaper resource, that’s $28.89 per hour times (4 hours writing plus 1.2 hours editing).)

Now we come to the Big Kahuna—localization cost:

The details:

• Here, we factor in localization efficiency. Both writers have a total of 62,500 words in their 250 topics. But the cheap writer gets only 5% credit for localization efficiency whereas the expensive writer gets 25%. Therefore, the actual word count for localization is much higher for the cheap resource.
• We then calculate the cost of localization of the actual word count sent for localization.
• The cost of translation into 10 languages is over $30,000 lower for the better content. This dwarfs the cost savings on writing the original content.

It’s also worth noting that 25% is relatively low. In more mature content creation environments, a more typical number is around 50%.

The expensive technical communicator who produces consistent, reusable content saves huge amounts of money in localization. Cheap writers can be very expensive.

The full spreadsheet is available as a public Google doc. Feel free to make yourself a copy and do your own calculations.